Abstract

This paper presents a study of the main current collaborative applications and shows how their architectural models focus on the interactive aspects of the systems for very specific applications. It also analyses state-of-the-art web service-based collaborative applications and shows how they only solve specific problems and do not provide an extensible and flexible architecture. From this study, we conclude that there is currently no standard architecture (and even less a web service-based one) which can be taken as a model for collaborative application development. We therefore propose a web service-based architectural model for the development of this type of application. This model provides flexible collaborative sessions in order to facilitate collaborative work in a consistent way and with group awareness mechanisms. The proposed architecture enables applications, components or tools to be added and can be extended with new web services when required without the need to modify existing services. The resulting collaborative applications are therefore flexible and extensible.